The past few weeks, I have felt as if I have been underwater.
Much of this can be attributed, I am sure, to the reality of an ongoing battle my body has waged with sinusitis, an inflammation of your sinuses which in turn impacts your ear drums, causing pain, inflammation, and the general feeling of being clogged up in your ears and your nose. No big deal, especially when compared to the health issues many are facing around the world.
Except when there is also a global pandemic going on all around you… and when the place of your birth, your “homeland”, has been cultivated on institutionalized racism, which continues to play out just as it was intended (a fact which is being brought into the light more and more) in the face of a global health crises plenty of time , which lends us plenty of time to suddenly be made aware of this fact of the past 400 years. Add in the challenges of being a 34-year-old woman who has moved back in with her parents, albeit temporarily; to a very busy role at a Center for Public Education, made more interesting by the impending reopening of public schools in the midst of COVID-19. Then add in construction workers and painters outside of your home office and bedroom window, and a pup who is more needy that usual because said painters (and a record breaking heat wave) have caused him to be confined more often than not. Pile those things right on top of one another.
On top, on top, on top. These days, there seems to be no end to the stressors piling up.
This is not to say that everything is bad. My family and I have remained healthy throughout this global pandemic, which is a massive blessing. The ability to crash with my folks for the past six months has allowed me to save in ways I haven’t been able to in years –great for the bank account. I am flourishing at the challenging, entrepreneurial role I have taken on within the University of Washington. And dating amidst the pandemic is surprisingly forthright.
But, let me tell you, the past few weeks I feel as if I have been below. Every-day stress (of life and living) and chronic stress (of being Black in America) and acute stress (of health issues and a global pandemic, with no end in sight) has led to the perpetuation of this feeling. I know I am not the only one who has felt and experienced this additional pressure. I think we are all feeling it, albeit in varying degrees, a little more embodied, than we ever have (or allowed ourselves to admit that we have).
And yet…there is so much yearning within, longing to burst out from the depths and make itself known on the surface. I have spoken with girlfriends who say this season of isolation screams at them their desire for partner and family, every single day. I have read the headlines which announce that people of color are significantly less likely to receive the PPE loans which could help their businesses stay afloat. I know that suffering from coronavirus (and the fear of contracting the coronavirus) and the distance that has required between us has been painful beyond measure for many people.
I have taken the last month off from writing, as things have been so cray. And what I have found is this: we are being invited to begin a new thing. We are being invited to face the old and begin anew.
Writing for me is like swimming, my love affair with which likely has brought on this latest bought of sinusitis and ear barotrauma. Swimming is something I love and giving it up is not an option. If I were not a beautifully embodied female author and artist, I would be a fish. I would still be mahogany, but I would spend my days navigating the currents.
My stroke would be the breast, as it always is (don’t know how that works out for a fish) and I would practice it masterfully…plunging down into the depths and giving myself over fully to the weightlessness of the current, blowing bubbles until I came up for air, then inhaling deeply only to plunge myself into the depths again. I would live here, peacefully, un-hindered, weightless, and delighted in.
The reality of our world is a bit more constraining than that, at present, and that is why I write in places that are not my journal. We are prophets, some of us, and that title causes us to have to be warriors. Yet to be a warrior requires that one learn to rest.
We must come up for air, each of us, for I sense we are in a marathon, not a sprint. These times will try us beyond our capacities, and require us to ask, “Who are we, really, and what do we believe?” These times will require us to try new things and admit that the old have not been working, nor have they served us well. These times will cause us to admit that despite the things we have inherited, we need to learn to rest, even if war is all we have ever known, and still rages around us now.
My name is Heather Dawn, and that name resonates with me as being more prophetic than ever in 2020. I am a beautiful, royal-colored flower which makes its home in the rocky places. And, as a person who has endured deep hardship, I continue to learn how to step out of darkness and into the light, as does the dawn. My call is to lead others in this as well, but right now, I am learning to let down my warrior status and learn to rest. And it is perhaps one of the hardest battles I have ever had to fight. To learn to be still, even while the storm rages around.
What is the breath of fresh air you need to come up for? What is it that has not been serving you well, of which you need to let go? What is the weightlessness which terrifies you to enter into and what might be the joy which awaits you on the other side?
Friends, I don’t know the answers. I am learning right alongside to navigate the intense pressure of this season, hopeful to come out whole on the other side. But there is something that swimming has taught me: to give yourself over fully to the stroke, to become efficient, and to find the joy of the task, is to release oneself fully into the process, exhaling all of the life in ones lungs into the water below, so that one might emerge in gleeful hope above the surface, finally finding oneself on the other side.
It is time to exhale and come up to the surface.
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